OpenTofu is a community-driven fork of Terraform that exists to keep an infrastructure-as-code tool of Terraform’s lineage under an open-source license. The project describes itself as “a reliable, flexible, community-driven infrastructure as code tool under the Linux Foundation’s stewardship,” and explicitly as “a drop-in replacement for Terraform, preserving your existing workflows and configurations.” It remains compatible with the broad Terraform ecosystem of providers and modules.
OpenTofu was born from a licensing dispute. In August 2023, HashiCorp relicensed Terraform from the open-source Mozilla Public License to the Business Source License (BSL), a source-available license with use restrictions. A group of companies and contributors that depended on Terraform asked HashiCorp to reverse the change. The OpenTofu manifesto records the request: “we asked HashiCorp to switch back to an open-source license to ensure a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community could unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.”
When that appeal went unanswered, the group acted. The manifesto states plainly: “With no response from Hashicorp by August 25, we created a fork of Terraform, which is now public.” The fork was started by companies including Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, and Scalr, and was placed under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation specifically so that no single vendor could unilaterally change its license again.
Since the fork, OpenTofu has tracked compatibility with the Terraform configuration language while adding features of its own, such as state encryption, resource exclusion, provider iteration with for_each, and early variable evaluation. As a neutral, foundation-governed project, OpenTofu became the canonical example of an open-source community routing around a vendor relicensing, comparable in spirit to earlier forks prompted by license changes.